Visiting the Google homepage at this time,  the traditional search engine logo is replaced by a doodle, a personalized image dedicated to a particular occasion. This time it is a self-celebration: the Mountain View group blows out its first 21 candles today. Actually, the foundation dates back to September 4, 1998. So why is the cake cut today?

Google turns 21 today (or maybe not)

The reason is to be found in the fact that for some time now bigG has decided to pay homage to the beginning of its adventure on September 27th, a date chosen in 2002 for the first celebrations with attached doodle. In over two decades the range has been extended far beyond the boundaries of SERPs and indexed links, with a business model that now consists of advertising and productivity tools, autonomous driving and streaming, hardware products and drones, medical research and artificial intelligence just to give some examples.

21 years ago two Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Lawrence (Larry) Page, published a document about the launch of a prototype for a “large-scale search engine”.

The name is inspired by “googol”, a term coined in the late 1930s by the American mathematician Edward Kasner and used to indicate an integer formed by a “1” and followed by a hundred “0”. A Page seemed a perfect metaphor for the vastness of the online world. The original idea dates back to 1996 and legend has it that the “google” domain was registered on September 15, 1997 due to a spelling mistake. The rest is history.

For the occasion, today the official store offers a 21% discount on most of the products sold, with the exception of those linked to Stadia and some services.